Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and Transgender Studies

Mission:

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender and Queer Studies is concerned with the analysis and critique of sexual systems, discourses and representations, particularly those which animate, inform and impinge upon the lives of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Such systems and discourses occur in institutional, community, domestic and intimate contexts, are closely connected to other social and cultural practices (such as nationalism, education or popular entertainment), and play a critical role in the formation and communication of individual and group identity. Members also work with the ICA leadership to represent the concerns of lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender scholars in the Association.

Announcements:

NEWS OF POTENTIAL INTEREST:

Full PhD Scholarships in the School of Media and Communication, University of Leeds

The School of Media and Communication is offering a number of full PhD Scholarships for study commencing in October 2015. Applications submitted in December will have sufficient time for review and approval before the scholarship deadlines below. All scholarships require prior acceptance for admission.

Research Council funded awards are available from the AHRC through the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities and from the ESRC through the White Rose Doctoral Training Centre. Closing dates for these are 2 February and 3 February 2015 respectively.

In addition the School is funding full scholarships covering maintenance and fees, equivalent to the Home/EU rate, for a period of three years from October 2015. They support full-time study leading to a PhD in any area of the School research activities, and are open to home/EU and international applicants. Closing date for School Scholarships is 1 May 2015.

It is now approaching 30 years since Jump Cut published the essay Men’s Pornography Gay vs Straight in which Tom Waugh was to attempt (perhaps for the first time) a systematic analysis and comparison of the representations and conditions of production, exhibition and consumption of straight and gay male pornography. In the wake of (and in the spirit of) Waugh’s intervention, a generation of scholars across Film, Media and Cultural Studies have been inspired to conduct their own studies of gay male pornography, its textual contours and its significances.

In the intervening years a great deal has changed in the media landscape and as a consequence the porn industry, gay and straight has a visibility that was inconceivable when Waugh wrote his essay in the middle of the 1980s. It’s in this radically changed context that this special edition of Porn Studies aims to take stock of the current state of scholarship that takes gay male pornography as its object of study.

From new formats and new modes of access, to new research avenues and new ways to make sense of what gay male porn means for its audience, the special edition will map the current terrain and indicate the direction for future research.

Submissions of particular interest are not limited to but may address: *

‘From Grace Jones to Gaga, divas to dildos, Queer Tracks is an original and theoretically important contribution to the corpus of queer popular music studies. Through captivating accounts of rock and pop performers and texts, Doris Leibetseder’s provocative analysis of queer aesthetics, tactics and subversive strategies makes for an utterly compelling and enlightening read.’ – Jodie Taylor, Queensland Conservatorium, Griffith U, Australia and author of Playing it Queer: Popular Music, Identity and Queer World-making

‘Queer Tracks takes up its place in a growing body of scholarship genuinely concerned with queer strategies in popular music. In it, Doris Leibetseder navigates well the waters of queer theory, drawing on a wide range of theoretical concepts, from irony, parody, satire and camp, through mimesis, mimicry, and masquerade, to cyborgs and trans. Along the way, she guides the reader confidently through well-informed interpretation of a number of classic cases – Madonna, Peaches, Björk, Grace Jones, Annie Lennox – and pulls in strands from feminism and critical race theory. This book will prove a useful resource to any scholar or student in the field of popular music studies who is interested in issues of gender, sexuality, race, or identity at its broadest.’ – Freya Jarman, U of Liverpool, UK

Queer Tracks describes motifs in popular music that deviate from heterosexual orientation, the binary gender system and fixed identities.

This cutting-edge work deals with the key concepts of current gender politics and queer theory in rock and pop music, including irony, parody, camp, mask/masquerade, mimesis/mimicry, cyborg, transsexuality, and dildo. Queer Tracks is a revised translation of Queere Tracks.

Subversive Strategien in Rock- und Popmusik, originally published in German.

We are pleased to announce the launch of our new website for the Global Queer Cinema project; a collaborative research project engaged in investigating queer film cultures from a global perspective and analysing world cinema from a queer point of view. The project is led by Rosalind Galt (University of Sussex) and Karl Schoonover (University of Warwick) and it is funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council Research Network Grant. We are partnered with the British Film Institute and CineCity – the Brighton Film Festival.

We would like to invite you to take part in the project by reading, commenting on and discussing the project over at our website. The editorial collective for the website comprises Karl, Rosalind, and Catherine Grant (University of Sussex and Film Studies for Free). Our fellow contributor is Laura Ellen Joyce (University of Sussex), GQC Project Coordinator. The website collective also benefits from the support of the international editorial advisory board of its publisher REFRAME.Writings from members of the editorial board and the GQC network are launching the site, but we are eager to publish work from guest contributors. Please see our call for contributions here.

As for what you can already find archived here, our series Queer Frames asks an author to take a look at a single frame from a movie and analyse it. Long Takes offer a deeper look at films, directors and issues in queer global cinema. There are several short series which cover themes from the Queer Uncanny to Home Movies to Queer Cosmetics.

Posts will also focus on Queer Film Cultures, raising awareness of film festivals, events and activities. In addition, there is an online, and openly accessible,queer film studies resources section.

We will update the website regularly to alert our readers to the events and opportunities arising from the GQC project. So please use our website feed for updates, and also follow and talk to us on Twitter and Facebook.

Please share this information with colleagues and friends who may be interested, and take part in our community.

Proposal due30 May 2014.(1000-1500 words); Acceptance Notification by 30 July 2014; Final Submission due 30 December 2014 (5000-8500 words)

CALL:

Queer fandom nowadays has become a global phenomenon. It helps exemplify the complexities, anxieties, conflicts, and negotiations within and surrounding the collision of global, national, and regional cultures. Some of its subdivided fields, such as Western slash and Japanese Boys’Love (BL), have received significant academic attention since 1980s (e.g., Aoyama, 1988; Bacon-Smith 1992; Buckley 1991; Fujimoto 1991; Jenkins 1992; Kinsella 1998; Matsui 1993; Penley 1992; Russ 1985).

Meanwhile, the blooming of Chinese queer fandoms in the past two decades has also offered rich sites of queer representations of gender and sexuality. Greatly shaped by Chinese traditional romantic literature, Japanese BL, and Western slash cultures (Feng 2009; Xu & Yang 2013; Yang & Bao 2012; Zheng 2009), contemporary Chinese queer fan cultures have been enjoying a growing diversity. The objects Chinese fans queerly fantasize about are by no means limited to local Chinese celebrities, nor to self-identified queer celebrities. The proliferation of cross-regional, cross-cultural, and transnational Chinese queer fandoms dedicated to androgynous celebrities, queer media, and popular culture is also hard to ignore. Yet, research explicating the intricacies of gender identities, sexual desires, regional differences, national belongings, and global queer cultural convergence and hybridization within Chinese queer fandoms is still far from adequate.

To fill this research gap, this edited collection stresses the struggles, potentials, and dynamics of queerness unveiled within a variety of the fannish contexts of Greater China. Bearing on the intersecting of global cultures studies, post-colonial studies, modern queer theory, and media audience research, we view queerness as a nonstraight spectatorial position (Doty 1993; Kohnen 2008) and/or a productive space (Munoz 1999). Accordingly, we aim to examine Chinese queer fandom as a grassroots cultural palimpsest that reconfigure, contest against, trespass, and/or overturn the dominant scripts of identity and subjectivity.

We seek chapter contributions that elaborate the cultural specificities, significances, transformativity, hybridity, historicity, and futurity epitomized by Chinese queer fan cultures. We are especially keen to receive manuscripts that consider the queer dimensions of gender, sexuality, desire, and fantasy from a wide range of Chinese temporal and geographical settings. We also very welcome submissions that employ interdisciplinary and/or comparative approaches.

Love/Femslash Industries, Fans’ Passions for Queering and Queerness, and the Commercialization of and Censorship on Queer Media in Greater China

Note:

We are only interested in academic analytic papers grounded in certain critical/theoretical perspectives that have NOT been published elsewhere.

To submit chapter proposal submissions for consideration, please send a 1000- to 1500-word abstract (outlining the topic, methods, and fan-related materials used) with working bibliography and a CV to the book editors at queerfandom2014@yahoo.com by 30 May 2014.

Acceptance will be handled on a rolling basis till the end of July, 2014. Early submissions are strongly encouraged.

Completed, well-polished papers from accepted contributors should run between 5,000 to 8,500 words and are expected before the end of December, 2014.

Queer Film Culture: Queer Cinema and Film Festivals

International Conference
University of Hamburg,
14-15 October 2014 in conjunction with Lesbisch Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival (14-19 October 2014)

The queer film and festival landscape has seen vast changes in the last
25 years. On the occasion of the 25th anniversary of the Lesbisch
Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival we want to
assess the status of queer film culture in the form of queer cinema and
film festivals today. Considering the availability of queer images, are
queer film festivals still necessary? The vast number of more than 200
active festivals worldwide suggests they are. Then, what are the tasks
and functions that queer film festivals serve for today’s queer film
culture? What is shown at these events? The buzz of recent arthouse
releases such as Weekend and Blue Is the Warmest Color beckons the
question: What is queer cinema today? Have we reached a post-gay era of
global art cinema or has a the New Wave Queer Cinema arrived?

This two-day international conference hosted by the University of
Hamburg, taking place during and in conjunction with the Lesbisch
Schwule Filmtage Hamburg | International Queer Film Festival will bring
together a stellar cast of international film and festival studies
scholars, critics and festival programmers to discuss these issues. Two
keynotes delivered by Prof. B. Ruby Rich (University of California,
Santa Cruz) and Dr. Marijke de Valck (University of Amsterdam) will
frame the conference and bring together the fields of film festival
studies and queer cinema. In three panels we will approach Queer Film
Culture from various angles. In a first panel, festival scholars will
present current research on LGBT/Q film festivals. In a second panel,
festival programmers will discuss the current tasks and challenges of
LGBT/Q film festivals. In a third panel, film scholars will assess the
current trends in queer cinema. In addition, the documentary film Queer
Artivism, which is screened with the filmmakers in attendance, will
provide audiovisual input from five LGBT/Q film festivals.

Feminist Reception Studies in a Post-Audience Age: Returning to Audiences and Everyday Life

Andre Cavalcante, University of Virginia,
Andrea Press, University of Virginia,
Katherine Sender, University of Auckland,
Editors

From its inception, the qualitative study of media audiences has been informed by feminist concerns. Pioneering work in the field such as Herzog’s classic study about female listeners of daytime radio soap operas, Hobson’s analysis of the role of television in working class housewives’ daily round, and Radway’s exploration into female readers of romance novels, foregrounded women’s experiences with media, and pushed the boundaries of the social science/humanities divide that existed in media studies. In doing so, they exposed the lived realities of women’s everyday lives, which emerged as a worthy object of academic analysis, transcending existing methodological boundaries in the process.
Since this work, feminist media and communication studies has continued to pioneer analyses of media reception in the context of everyday life. Extending beyond women, the field has offered insight into lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) experiences with media. It has also explored the changing role of sex, gender, and desire, as media have become increasingly portable, social, and integrated into the fabric of commerce, politics, culture, and daily life. In light of rapid and widespread shifts in contemporary communications technologies and the emergence of new media environments, we argue for a reinvestment in scholarship that critically attends to the relationship between media, audiences and everyday life, and that continues to transcend the divide between the social science and humanities in the tradition of earlier feminist audience research.
In this special issue of Feminist Media Studies, we call for abstracts that reflect a commitment to feminist and/or queer audience scholarship in our contemporary media environment, or what some call a “post-audience” age. We seek feminist audience research that interrogates the everyday world, attending to how it is differently experienced by individuals across the gender spectrum. In other words, our goal is to bring together a diverse body of work that deploys a feminist lens to study how our contemporary media culture deploys a feminist lens to study how audiences make media meaningful in the gendered context of everyday life.

Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
- What the ‘post-audience’ age means for everyday experiences of gender
- The ways LGBTQ individuals use new media in their everyday lives
- Conducting feminist audience research in the ‘post audience’ age
- The significance of media to women at various stages of life
- The gendered dimensions of transnational audiences
- The way gender influences audiences’ practices of reception and reading strategies
- How audiences conceive of feminism
- Media’s role in daily experiences of gender, embodiment, sexuality, and desire
- Experiences of gender and sexual subjectivity in virtual worlds
- The relationship between media, affect, and the body
- Thoughts on audience research methodology in the ‘post audience’ age of new media
- The impact of feminism and postfeminism on audience research methodology

Abstracts should be no more than 750 words and should be sent to all three special issue editors (apress@virginia.edu, amc7jc@virginia.edu and k.sender@auckland.ac.nz) by May 15, 2015. Please give your email the subject head “Abstract for special issue of Feminist Media Studies.” Abstracts should be submitted as a Word document. Please make sure your name and the paper title is on the abstract itself, not only in the email.